You wake up in the morning and have breakfast, and maybe just before bedtime you have a midnight snack. Like many people, you may be eating over the course of fifteen hours a day or more.
Now a new study published in the journal Cell Metabolism by researchers at the Salk Institute near San Diego has found that by consolidating your food intake during the day, leaving more time for overnight fasting, may help you lose weight.
The study followed more than 150 people who were not dieting, tracking their daily eating patterns, according to a story in the Los Angeles Times. The researchers found that most people would eat fewer than 25 percent of their daily calories before noon, while taking in more than a third after 6 pm. Rather than the typical three meals a day, most participants consumed food throughout the day, with fewer than 10 percent who went more than twelve hours overnight without eating.
Looking at animal studies, the Salk researchers hypothesized that a longer overnight fast would enable human subjects to lose weight more easily. In studies with mice, such fasting helped reset the animal’s internal clock and increase the bodies’ ability to burn calories.
The researchers recruited a small group of eight subjects who were overweight and who typically took in food over the course of fourteen hours or more per day. The participants were asked to stay on a stricter eating regime, consolidating their caloric intake over no more than twelve hours a day, thus increasing their overnight fast to twelve hours or longer.
Over sixteen weeks, the participants averaged weight loss of more than seven pounds. The study found that in addition to resetting their internal clocks, by consolidating their eating the participants took in 20 percent fewer calories per day.